Case Study 1 — Chapter 25: Leadership and Influence

Jordan: Direction and Cover

Background

Ten weeks into the Strategic Director role, Jordan calls a team of twelve. He has made three structural changes that Rivera's feedback prompted (protected morning blocks, delegated routine decisions, clarified decision rights). He has made one larger observation: the team has a culture problem he did not create and now has to address.

The previous CX team lead had operated in what Jordan recognizes, from the chapter's framework, as a primarily transactional style with control-oriented management: contingent reward for compliance, management by exception with a punitive edge. Team members had learned to manage up — to present information in ways that minimized their own exposure — rather than to surface problems early. The result: Jordan was getting clean status reports and discovering messy realities three weeks later.

The culture problem had a name: Rivera, who had been honest with Jordan early, described it simply: "People here are used to protecting themselves. The previous director had a good memory for when things went wrong and a short memory for when things went well."

The Psychological Safety Work

Jordan identifies psychological safety as the primary leverage point. He applies the diagnostic: the team's social norms are producing information suppression, which is producing decision quality problems, which is producing the cascade of discovered-late-stage-problems that is his primary operational frustration.

He makes four deliberate behavioral changes:

First: In the next all-hands meeting, he discloses a mistake publicly. The database transition had a week of delay that was partly his fault — he had received a vendor timeline estimate and not adequately verified the assumptions. He names this at the all-hands: "The migration ran a week late. I underestimated the validation time in the vendor timeline. That's on me. Here's what we're doing about it."

He watches the room. The silence is different from uncomfortable silence — it's attentive. Priya, sitting at the edge of the table, catches his eye briefly and then looks away. After the meeting, she comes by and says: "I've never seen a director here do that."

Jordan says: "Do it forward. If you make a mistake, name it. I'll do the same."

Second: He establishes a "fast flag" norm: any significant problem that arises, he wants to know about within 24 hours. Not to fix it immediately — just to know. He explicitly decouples the reporting of a problem from the evaluation of the person reporting it: "Fast flag is not a performance measure. Fast flag is good judgment. The cover-up is the problem, not the underlying thing."

Third: When a data analyst named Chen (different from Jordan's running-group friend) brings him a significant error in the Q2 report — a segmentation miscalculation that affects four of the twelve charts — he says: "Thank you for catching this. How far back does the error go and what's the fastest path to a correction?" No implication that Chen should have caught it sooner. No visible frustration. Later, he mentions it to Rivera: "Chen did the right thing. Let him know you noticed."

Fourth: In his weekly 1:1s, he starts asking a question he had not asked before: "What's not going well that I should know about?" Most weeks, the first few responses are "everything is fine." By week four, Priya tells him about a recurring friction with a vendor relationship that has been producing unreliable deliverables — a problem she had been managing around for eight months without escalating.

The Rivera Situation

Rivera is, Jordan recognizes, the most experienced and most influential informal leader on the team. Rivera was also, in the second week, the person who told Jordan he was over-controlling. Jordan has been paying attention to Rivera since.

In week eight, Rivera comes to a 1:1 with a problem that is also, clearly, a test. The team has an opportunity to partner with a peer team on a cross-functional project. Rivera thinks they should do it; Rivera also thinks the resourcing isn't there and that the project will fail without additional headcount. Rivera presents both things clearly and then sits back.

Jordan knows what the old response would be: commit to the partnership, figure out the resource problem later. Or decline the partnership because the resource problem is real. Both are transactional responses.

He asks: "What would you need from me to make the partnership work if we decided to pursue it?"

Rivera: "Cover on the timeline if it slips. And real buy-in from you on making the case for the extra resource — not just passing it up, actually advocating for it."

Jordan: "If I advocate for the resource and don't get it, and we proceed anyway with current capacity, can you still make it work?"

Rivera considers this carefully. "Probably. It would require Priya taking on more than is fair to ask without acknowledging it."

Jordan: "So part of what you need is for me to tell Priya directly that she's being asked to do something significant and that I'm aware of it."

Rivera: "Yes."

Jordan: "I can do all three of those things."

Rivera: "Then I think we should do it."

After the conversation, Jordan notes what happened: Rivera had come in with a problem that had a test embedded in it. The test was whether Jordan would provide cover — absorb risk and advocate for resources — or whether he would extract the commitment and leave Rivera to manage the consequences alone. Jordan had passed the test. Not by being accommodating but by being specific about what he could and would do.

The Priya Development Conversation

Six weeks earlier, Jordan had transferred the procrastination insight to Priya ("you can't revise nothing"). Since then, he has noticed something: Priya is the most capable analyst on the team and the person who receives the least developmental attention because she performs consistently and doesn't require management.

He schedules a development-specific 1:1. Not a performance review. A question: "Where do you want to go?"

Priya is briefly uncertain — she is not used to being asked this. She says she has been thinking about whether she wants to stay in analytics or move toward strategy. She doesn't know how to find out.

Jordan: "The cross-functional project with Rivera gives you some exposure to the strategy dimension — you'd be doing the analysis that informs the strategic recommendation, and you'd be in the room when the recommendation is made. That's a low-risk way to find out if the strategic dimension interests you."

Priya: "I hadn't thought of it that way."

Jordan: "What else would you need to find out?"

They spend twenty minutes on it. At the end, Priya says: "No one here has ever asked me that question."

Jordan makes a note: "Tell Priya at least once a quarter what I specifically notice that she does well. Make the development conversation a standing item."

The Direction Problem

By week twelve, the team's psychological safety is measurably improved — problems are surfacing earlier, Rivera is more engaged, Chen has caught two additional issues before they reached clients. But a different problem has emerged: the direction is unclear.

Jordan has been excellent at responding to problems. He has been less consistent at articulating where the team is going — the three-year vision that the strategy document is supposed to represent. Three different team members, in separate 1:1s, ask versions of the same question: "What are we actually trying to build?"

He takes this to Sandra.

Sandra says: "You've sorted the culture. Now you need to sort the narrative. People can tolerate a lot if they know where they're going."

Jordan: "The strategy document is mostly written."

Sandra: "A document isn't a narrative. What's the one sentence that describes what this team does and why it matters in three years?"

Jordan doesn't have it.

He goes back to his desk. He opens the strategy document. He reads it through. And then he writes, not in Section 3 but at the top of a blank page:

"We build the evidence that allows the company to understand its customers well enough to serve them better than the alternative — not because we're told to, but because serving customers well is how this company earns the right to exist."

He reads it back. It is not a perfect sentence. But it is a real sentence — one he believes.

He brings it to the next all-hands. Not as an official strategic statement. As what he actually thinks they're doing. He asks the team: "Does this match what you think we're doing? What would you change?"

The conversation lasts forty minutes. The sentence gets revised three times. By the end it belongs to the team, not just to Jordan.

Analysis Questions

Jordan's four psychological safety behaviors (public mistake disclosure, fast flag norm, unreactive response to Chen's error report, "what's not going well" 1:1 question) operate on different mechanisms. Which Cialdini principle does the public mistake disclosure most directly activate? And how does it change the informational environment of the team?
Rivera's test embedded in the cross-functional opportunity conversation — "will you provide cover?" — is a test of benevolence-based trust specifically. The chapter identifies three bases of trust: integrity, ability, and benevolence. Why does Rivera's test target benevolence rather than integrity or ability? What would passing an ability-based trust test look like in this context?
Jordan's development conversation with Priya represents the "individualized consideration" dimension of transformational leadership. The chapter notes that development investment satisfies the competence need and the relatedness need simultaneously. How does the conversation Jordan has with Priya satisfy both needs — and why does it matter that he is asking about her direction, not just her performance?
The direction problem — three team members separately asking "what are we actually trying to build?" — emerges after Jordan has addressed the psychological safety problem. Why does psychological safety generate the direction need? What is the connection between feeling safe enough to speak up and needing to know where you're going?
Jordan's final sentence about the team's purpose is revised by the team before it becomes shared. The chapter describes this as moving from the leader's vision to the team's shared narrative. How does co-creation of the vision statement serve the team's autonomy need (SDT)? What is the difference between a vision that the leader holds and a vision that the team holds?